Office 2003 files open extremely slowly when clicked on in Windows Explorer

On every PC in our organization, office 2003 files (word, excel, access databases) all open slowly (30-60 seconds) when clicked on in Windows Explorer. When opened directly through one of the applications, these open immediately. I've tried many solutions including office repair, rebuilding individuals profiles, re-associating file types with the correct application and haven't had any success. On my own pc, I was able to get word documents opening quickly by changing the file association for .doc to open with <installation folder>\winword.exe /e "%1" /n . I read about this in a post somewhere and I have no idea why it works. If anyone knows what the /e, /n and the %1 attributes are, please let me know. I am curious also how I would push this out to all users if this was indeed a valid fix and not just a temporary patch. The same fix did nothing for excel files and gave me an error for access databases.